Exercises & Assignment -- Week 14; Definition: "Refrain"

Read "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Exercise 1:

Paraphrase each of the four sections of this poem.

Exercise 2:

This poem is considered a "ballad". Explain what is a ballad and why this poem is a ballad.

Exercise 3:

A refrain is a repetition of words, phrases or lines at regular intervals. When refrains follow a stanza they are called terminal refrains. When refrains are within stanzas they are called internal refrains. When a refrain changes a little with each repetition it is called an incremental refrain.

What is the refrain in the poem "The Lady of Shalott"? Where is it and what type(s) is it?

Exercise 4:

Listen to Loreena McKennitt's musical adaptation of "The Lady of Shalott". Which stanzas did McKennitt leave out and which stanzas did she use? Do you think that McKennit chose most appropriate stanzas or would you have included or excluded other stanzas?

Exercise 5:

Consider the "curse" of the Lady. What do you think was this curse? What triggered it to come into effect?

Exercise 6:

Identify the "liminal spaces" in this poem, and explain why you think they are liminal.

Exercise 7:

Discuss the similarities between the Lady's Castle and Plato's Cave.



Exercise 8:

It is possible that the Lady of Shallot is an allegorical figure. What do you think the Lady symbolizes? Keeping your answer in mind, what do you think the poem is about?

Two Musical Interpretations of Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot"

Animated Readings of Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot"

Exercises & Assignment -- Week 13b

Exercise 1:

Paraphrase Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade". Then, summarize your paraphrase into one or two sentences, focusing on the topic, theme and tone of the poem.

Assignment:

As a group assignment, write an analytical paragraph of Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade".

A Reading of Alfred Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" and a Video Clip from an Old Movie Depicting the Event

A Reading of Alfred Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" and some Musical Interpretations

A Reading of Alfred Tennyson's "The Eagle"

Biographical Sketch: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Image from the University of Glasgow.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire (England). He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Arthur Henry Hallam, whom he later immortalized in In Memoriam (1850). Tennyson began to write when a child, largely to escape the oppressiveness of his homelife, made miserable by his father’s drinking and violence. He published some of his best-known poems, such as “Mariana” and “The Kraken,” when he was only twenty; in “Mariana,” he displays his early, and enduring, gift for suing objects and landscapes to convey states of mind and particular emotions. Between 1833, the date of Hallam’s death, and 1843, when Tennyson received an annual government pension to support his writing, he was especially hard-hit by the melancholia that would plague him all his life and so dominate his poetry. In the wake of Hallam’s death, Tennyson’s work assumed a decidedly darker note. He expressed his grief abstrusely in such poems as “Ullyses” and “Break, Break, Break” and directly in In Memoriam, a series of 131 quatrain stanzas written in iambic tetrameter, which Tennyson began within days of Hallam’s death and continued to write over a period of seventeen years. With the publication of In Memoriam, he finally attained the public recognition long denied him and earned syfficient money to marry Emily Sellwood after a ten-year on-again off-again courtship. He remained immensely popular until his death. His last major work was Idylls of the King, a project that occupied him for nearly fifty years; the first four idylls were published in 1859, and the complete cycle of twelve in 1885. In the work, which popularized the then obscure Arthurian legend, Tennyson upholds medieval ideals, such as community, heroism, and courtly love, and compares the decay of the Round Table to the moral decline of his own society.